Frank commentary from a retired call girl

Rough Trade (Part One)

Every profession has its dangers, and an omnipresent one for whores of every level is the possibility of rape, though obviously it is much more likely for streetwalkers (especially at the hands of cops, but we’ll talk about that another day). Because call girls deal with a much higher class of clientele in much more controlled settings, our chances of being raped are far lower than those of our sisters in the street, but those chances still exist and if a girl works for long enough the possibility of rape becomes a virtual certainty. I was raped twice in my career, and one other time I barely avoided it; strangely enough it was the latter incident which was the most frightening of the three, for reasons which will become clear when I talk about it tomorrow. In any case, I feel compelled to issue this warning to my readers: Though I will do my best to describe these events as neutrally and without lurid detail as possible, it may still be a bit difficult for those of delicate disposition or women who have themselves been raped. If you belong to one of those two groups, you may wish to stop reading now (or at least when you get to the paragraph starting with “the first time I was raped on a call”) and skip tomorrow’s column altogether because I really have no desire to cause anyone distress. I would rather not have to talk about it at all, but the only way to combat ignorance is with complete honesty, and that means discussing the ugly aspects of harlotry as honestly as the beautiful ones.

First of all, what is rape? There are probably a dozen ways to define it, but there are things that are legally called “rape” which are not, in my mind, rape; chief among these is statutory rape. I lost my virginity on my fifteenth birthday to an eighteen-year-old, and I’m sure that at least a few of the guys I had in the next few years were over the imaginary line which separates “child” from “adult”. By law, all of those experiences were rape, to which I reply “Bullshit”; I was completely in control of every one of those encounters, even the first one. What’s more, few of the men I slept with had any idea how young I was; though I look much younger than my real age now, as a teenager I was the opposite. Throughout my late teens people consistently estimated my age as 25, and I was “carded” for the first time in my life in 1996 (at the age of 29). But despite all these facts, any of the men who enjoyed me when I was 15 or 16 could have been prosecuted for “rape”, which IMHO only dilutes the strength of the word.

Conversely, there are people who would claim a hooker cannot be raped because she has already consented, and many of these ignoramuses are actually in positions of power. In 2007 a municipal judge in Philadelphia, Teresa Carr Deni, dismissed the case against a group of men who raped an escort at gunpoint, charging them instead with “theft of services” (read story here). What makes this even more reprehensible is that though local feminist organizations reacted to the story, the response of national feminism was lackluster at best; I’m sure if the judge had been male or the victim a teacher they would’ve had a field day. Note that the girl was rescued by a fifth man who was invited by the rapists to participate, but realized what was going on and instead rescued her; note also the first response to the linked story, in which a neofeminist uses the incident to argue for the abolition of sex work. A man recognized rape when he saw it while a “career woman” and “feminists” used the victim to further their agendas, and that is nothing short of disgusting.

I would define rape as “the taking by force of that which a woman cannot be persuaded by other means to give.” So yes, we can be raped. Consent to one act does not equal consent to ALL acts, and once force is used all bets are off. I must also point out that deception is a form of force, since the fraud tricks a woman into giving something she would not otherwise have given; if any of you men out there have ever paid an escort with your credit card and then charged it back when your wife discovered the bill, YOU ARE A RAPIST. You took her favors after agreeing on a price, then stole the money back. That is rape, no less than drugging a girl with Rohypnol and fucking her while she is unconscious. In fact, it’s probably the sleaziest and most cowardly form of rape. It is, however, not violent; the very few times I’ve had a credit card chargeback that actually stood up (they can usually be successfully challenged) I felt angry rather than violated. This column is not about such collection-plate thieves, but rather about bona fide, hands-on violence.

The first time I was raped on a call was not the first time I had been raped in my life; that was five years earlier, long before I became a professional, and was both more brutal and far more frightening. I don’t really care to discuss the incident right now, and I may never do so in this column; suffice it to say that there were three men in positions of power, and that both guns and a massive violation of trust were involved. But I was a tough little bird even then, and by the time of the incident I am about to describe I had largely dealt with it. I was enjoying the freedom and money that goes with being a call girl, and sometimes I was even enjoying the sex. The nightmares and flashbacks had become fairly rare; my experiences with boyfriends in my youth and customers in the preceding months had been so overwhelmingly positive that the trauma was largely drowned in a sea of good experiences with men, both before and after the rape.

There was no way I could have guessed what awaited me that night; I had already done five calls and was high on the knowledge that I had already made a large profit, with another fee on the way! The customer was at the Windsor Court, New Orleans’ only five-star hotel, which I always enjoyed visiting because it is so beautiful and the staff so friendly and respectful. The only oddity about the call (though it sent up no red flags at the time) was that I had not spoken to the customer myself; the arrangements had been made by Doug, the best agent of the several I worked with. This was necessary because the client was from Paris and spoke no English, nor do I speak French. Doug does, and so was able to set up the call for me. I trusted Doug’s instincts (and still do; this incident could not be blamed on him as you will see), the customer was in a very expensive hotel, and just before I arrived Doug gave me ANOTHER call to set up for afterward at the hotel next door, which would bring my total to seven if it went through! The client seemed very nice, smiled at me and paid as soon as I came in; I had absolutely no sign of possible danger, no indication that this was not going to go smoothly and quickly. Things went as they usually do on a call of this type (except for there being absolutely zero talking) and after a bit of foreplay he indicated he wanted to enter me. After a few minutes of that, however, he suddenly pulled out and attempted to change orifices.

I was not remotely an anal virgin; I had experienced and enjoyed such sex many times with boyfriends and with my ex. But I never did it with customers for the simple reason that it can be excruciating if done incorrectly, and a stranger simply cannot be trusted to take his time and follow instructions so as to make the experience pleasant for the woman. So when he started probing there, I said “No” firmly and squirmed backward to get away from him. Since that word sounds the same in French as in English and my body language was unmistakable, what happened next can only be called rape; he grabbed my shoulders, dropped his whole weight down on me, and rammed into me in one rapid motion. I started to scream but he put his hand over my mouth, also getting my nostrils in the process so that I couldn’t breathe. At that moment my brain focused instantly; I felt utterly calm and realized that if I stopped struggling he would probably let go of my face, or at least relax his hand so I could get my nose free. The pain was at that point secondary to survival, so I went completely limp. As predicted, he loosened his grip enough for me to twist my nose clear of his hand, and then I was able to concentrate on willing myself to relax so the rest of the experience would be something less than agony.

Fortunately, it didn’t take him long after that, and when he withdrew the pain subsided fairly quickly, though of course the soreness persisted and would for some time. He went to the bathroom to clean up and though it took me a minute or so to compose myself I soon followed him, silently going over to the toilet; a warm washcloth removed the blood, and when I was fairly sure I wouldn’t stain my underwear I got dressed in silence. He didn’t seem to think he had done anything wrong, and he smiled and said something in French; when I slung my purse over my shoulder to go, he even spoke a cheery “Au revoir!”

“Adieu,” I replied, and went on to my next call. I was not exactly in the mood to continue working, but since I had already made the appointment professional ethics and greed combined to get me over there. As it turned out, it was the best thing I could’ve done; both the next customer and the one after him (I did eight calls in all that night, a record which stood until December of 2005) were very nice, very gentle, and were looking for nothing out of the ordinary. I have often thought how lucky I was that it happened that way; it’s like the folk wisdom that if one is thrown by a horse one must immediately get back on if one wishes to avoid being afraid of horses forever afterward. I did indeed get right back on, and as a result suffered no lasting ill effects other than a sore anus for a few days.

I didn’t understand then why it was apparently so easy for him to do what he did; men had tried unwelcome things with me many times before, but had always stopped when I asked them to. The body language of “no” is impossible to misread, and I didn’t believe there could be such a cultural gulf between France and the U.S. that he would ignore my wishes. Besides, I had seen plenty of European men before, including Frenchmen, and nothing like that had ever happened. So I put it down to his simply being a complete asshole and went on with my life, and it wasn’t until the second incident many months later that I figured it out, as I’ll discuss tomorrow. For that second incident bore a striking similarity to the first, and thereby demonstrated in no uncertain terms the value of forming a rapport with clients.

20 Responses

My condolences on your experience, Maggie. Rape is a despicable crime. It’s happened to someone very close to me, and ever since, I’ve thought all rapists deserve to be tortured and executed publicly for daring engage in such vile acts.

Thank you, Jay. As I said, my first time was far worse because I hadn’t yet learned professional detachment and was in fear for my life (I knew the Frenchman wasn’t going to kill me). But I honestly feel that the main reason it’s so much more traumatic for most women than it was for me is that most girls are plagued by feelings of guilt and sexual shame around the act itself, which I was mercifully spared because I have never thought of sex as anything dirty or shameful.

Fortunately, I’ve always reacted to crises that way; even if everyone else panics, I remain utterly calm. Strangely, I have found that I often start shaking and crying later, after the crisis is past (which is how I reacted to my first, pre-professional rape), but until it is over I always remain calm and totally lucid.

I’m sorry you had to go through this. I’m glad you had enough good experiences to help you through it.

It wasn’t that long ago that wives were considered “unrapeable,” at least if the man in question was her husband. We see things different these days, so perhaps the day will come when it is recognized that, yes, hookers can be raped.

Thank you, Sailor. I must consider myself fortunate that I only had a few such incidents, none of which resulted in disfigurement or permanent injury. Some streetwalkers have to endure this sort of thing regularly rather than only a few times in a career.

Your definition of rape is only slightly better than the corrupt feminist legal definition, if you really believe fraud is equal to force. “Rape” as it used to be defined by common law, and the way any reasonable person would still define it in my view, is “carnal knowledge of a woman by force and without consent.” I agree hookers can be raped like other women, but only by force and without consent, same as other women. Your credit card chargeback scenario certainly doesn’t satisfy this definition, because fraud isn’t force. Force in the context of rape is properly understood as a level of violence that the woman will resist to the best of her ability unless she would probably be killed or seriously injured, and only if sex is obtained despite such resistance has the woman been raped. This is also the definition employed by evolutionary psychologist, e.g. Thornhill & Palmer in A NATURAL HISTORY OF RAPE. Lower levels of sexual coercion, as well as sex obtained by fraud, do not qualify as rape under any reasonable definition, and of course statutory rape is also a bullshit legal fiction. Fucking an unconscious woman after drugging her isn’t rape either, unless she is *forcibly* drugged by the rapist, though this might arguably be criminalized as sexual exploitation.

If you agree to fuck a man for money, then afterwards all he owes you is the money he agreed to pay. Nothing can make him a rapist at this point, any more than a check forger can be redefined as an armed robber. You elsewhere on your blog reasonably point out that prostitution is just like selling other services. Why, then, make an absurd and draconian exception when there is a problem with the payment? How do you justify this? Your sense of entitlement to have the man treated like a rapist for credit card fraud is inconsistent with how you otherwise claim to see prostitution, unless you believe society should upgrade petty fraud to a heinous felony across the board and give any business recourse to that level of criminal prosecution whenever a customer fails to pay. If you were willing to put out for a few hundred dollars, then defrauding you out of your services is no worse than stealing a few hundred dollars from you, and so that’s the ballpark of crime that has been committed. You said yourself you felt angry rather than violated, so your own reaction isn’t even consistent with defining this as rape. Or alternatively, we can downgrade “rape” to a trivial offense, which is really what the feminists have done anyway by diluting the definition.

As I’ve written in other threads on this same subject, it isn’t my definition of rape that’s incorrect, but the modern teaching that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. Rape was not by any stretch of the imagination the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Stealing money from a person by armed force is called “robbery”, and stealing it by guile is called “theft”, but we recognize them both as stealing though we also recognize the latter as less serious than the former. Rape, once all the feminist and culture baggage is removed, is theft of sex from a woman. It can be forcible, in which case we call it “forcible rape” or “aggravated rape”, or it can be by guile, in which case it’s “simple rape”, and the latter is less serious than the former. Feminists want to pretend that all rape is equal, but that’s no more true than labeling every kind of theft as “armed robbery” or every kind of killing as “first-degree murder”.

“Rape, once all the feminist and culture baggage is removed, is theft of sex from a woman.”

What you are saying is basically the same as the feminist definition which they unfortunately have managed to pass into law in so many jurisdictions: Rape is simply sex without consent; force makes it worse (or not, depending on how fanatically they insist all rape is equally bad) but is not a necessary element in the crime. But this is historically and biologically incorrect. For centuries common law required force in addition to nonconsent, and biologists still don’t buy the feminist definition because they know humans are hardwired to recognize real rape and distinguish it from lesser forms of sexual coercion and sex obtained by deception.

I’m glad you admit that not all rape is equally heinous, but your insistence that all kinds of sex without consent is rape still means you have picked up a lot of feminist baggage. It is possible to steal from someone who puts up minimal or no resistance, but it is not possible to rape a woman who lets you have it even though she could have reasonably resisted, because rape is not analogous to theft.

I might put forth that the correct answer in this case would be “assault.” I haven’t gotten into this whole “is it is or is it isn’t rape” thing, but my own feeling is that rape is a crime of violence. I’m not talking a crime of violence and not of sex. I’m talking a crime of sexualized violence.

I’m perfectly willing to call “spread your legs or I’ll kill you” rape, too, even though in this case it is a threat of violence which the victim avoids by giving in. Fell free to replace “kill you” with “beat you bloody,” with “I know where your children go to school,” with “shoot your dog,” or “take you by force and it’ll be worse than if you give in.” Those are all rape. The credit card thing is deplorable, but I don’t quite see it as rape. I don’t feel strongly enough about that to argue back and forth. Maybe I’m all wet, but there it is.

I don’t see rape at its core as “theft of sex.” I see it as “assault and sex.”

Before rape law got corrupted to include any sex women come to regret, there were various laws against lesser sexual offenses constituting violations less than rape. For example, rape was actually quite reasonably defined here in Norway until just eleven years ago. As late as 2000, rape was sex obtained by violence or credible threat at least as severe as making the woman fear for her life or serious injury. There were other laws against sex with unconscious women or sex obtained by lesser threats, but this was not considered rape and the penalty was much lighter. They had names like “sexual exploitation” or “sex by threat” or whatever, but this isn’t rape and was rightly not regarded as such. Some of those old laws were reasonable and some not, but at least false rape was not institutionalized. Now everything is rape, which is absurd and draconian. It is enough to threaten to start a rumor about a woman, or to end a relationship, and if it gets you sex, it is rape. Mens rea was abolished at the same time (so now we also have “negligent rape”), and the minimum sentence for rape involving penetration has been raised to three years. Thus some very trivial sex crimes that used to be punished by a fine or a few months in jail are now all subsumed into one concept of rape. Also the definition has been corrupted to include all sorts of sexual acts besides intercourse. It is not even necessary to touch a woman to rape her; talking her into masturbating on a webcam is enough. One man just got ten years for that.

By using the word “rape” for lesser sexual coercion or just sex without consent, you engage in a form of insidious make-believe designed to demonize and punish men by taking advantage of a natural category to which these acts do not belong. It has been very successful so far, but it’s not right and we shouldn’t play along with it. Those who don’t bother to check the details of a case — which is most people — often totally get the wrong idea, which is great for feminist propaganda. Statutory rape works the same way, only now statutory rape is expanded to women of all ages by lowering the definition of rape to a technicality such as simply failing to get explicit consent.

Being afraid of words won’t solve anything; when one replaces an emotionally-loaded word with a euphemism, the euphemism soon takes on the negative baggage of the old word. Then a new euphemism is introduced, and so on. Better we just make the laws sensible and proportionate than to obsess on words.

Me afraid of words? No, it is you who make a category error. Rape isn’t an arbitrary concept that you get to define any way you want. The definition of rape is deeply ingrained in us by evolution because it has important implications for reproduction and trust. It matters, for example, to a husband whether his wife is raped or cheating. Imagine a wife trying to explain that she was raped because her credit card got charged back. Do you think that would fly very well? This litmus test can also be used to show that the threat or force in rape needs to be severe, and that defining rape as simple nonconsent is absurd. If a definition of rape won’t suffice to enable a reasonable husband to continue to trust his wife, why should it be enough in a rape trial?

Elvind, you’re getting upset without reason; we’re largely on the same side. Your argument is a semantic one; I don’t care WHAT the crime is called, and if you or legislators want to make up a word to avoid the cultural baggage imposed on it by feminists, be my guest.

Your evolutionary argument is spurious, however; since when have legal definitions had anything to do with evolution? Men freely fought, stole and killed each other until quite recently (from an evolutionary point of view), yet those behaviors are all illegal now (and rightly so).

Oh, I’m not upset at you. :) I agree with 99% of everything you write. But the definition of rape seems to me a blind spot of yours.

“Men freely fought, stole and killed each other until quite recently…”

Ah, but we hardly did those things freely. There were always consequences! Now we regulate them by law, which is arguably better than an old-fashioned blood feud, but the categories of rape and murder and robbery and so on are still largely the same as what is evolutionarily familiar to us. Ideally, law should be based on these natural categories whenever appropriate, which it certainly is for rape, or else you get really absurd and unfair results, which I’m sure you agree are not hard to find in our legal systems these days. Indeed you expose such miscarriages of justice all the time. The feminists didn’t impose the cultural baggage on rape as a heinous crime. Evolution did that for them, and now they are piggybacking on our natural revulsion to rape in order to empower themselves. This is not just a semantic argument; it is standing up to injustice.

Hi Maggie, I didn’t experience the kind of rape (namely anal penetration) that you had to go through.
But a client of mine treated me quite roughly and showed zero respect.
Just like you, I told him to stop, that I didn’t agree with that certain act.
He continued, of course. And after that, he didn’t seem to realize that he did something wrong. He just asked for another appointment. I didn’t react.
It’s so frustrating and sad, to learn that too much people don’t even see sex workers as human beings with boundaries and emotions.

I don’t hire prostitutes because I can’t afford them. But I’ve had a few table dances. I go as far as she’ll let me, but if she says “don’t touch me here” or “don’t do that” then I DON’T. Aside from the fact that I should respect people’s boundaries in general, she’s making an effort to entertain me, and to make it good for me. She’s making me feel like the studliest man in the place. Yes, I know she’s doing that because I gave her $20 and she’s hoping I’ll give her twenty more. So what? She’s making me feel good. At the very, very least I should be nice to somebody who’s making me feel good.

Reblogged this on Writings from a woman of pleasure and commented:
Of course a prostitute can be raped!!..for fuck’s sake…
Well, excuse me for my inappropriate vocabulary. But I felt very affected while reading this post.

Eivind Berge is right: a man who disputes a credit card transaction is guilty of theft, not rape. If a client grabs your purse after sex and steals the cash he paid you before sex, he is guilt of either theft or robbery. Probably robbery, because of the implied threat of force if you resist.

On the other hand, that experience at the Windsor is definitely rape. Sorry to hear about that.

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